Lemlist Review and Alternatives — Unique Email Outreach Tool With a Focus on Personalization

Lemlist is an email prospecting and automation tool that lets you reach out to your target audience and introduce them to your business. 

The thing about cold emails is that they’re usually boring, and they tend to sound monotonous or robotic. That’s why personalization is one of the key features to look for in a cold outreach tool. 

And no, we’re not just talking about addressing the prospect by their name. You can automate this part of the cold emails in virtually any autoresponder. Creating a templated email that can be customized to the point where it appears as though it was created for each individual prospect specifically can be a bit tricky.

That’s exactly what makes Lemlist stand out from other outreach tools. With a simple, yet extremely impactful feature — the ability to add dynamic images to your emails — Lemlist allows you to make every cold email unique.

In this Lemlist review, we’ll take a look at this one and other important features the tool has to offer, to help you assess how well it meets the needs of your business. We’ll also provide you with Lemlist alternatives and introduce you to other powerful software you can use to generate red-hot leads and skyrocket your revenue.

Why Listen to Us About Lemlist? 

Outreach and lead generation software is our home turf. Sell SaaS CEO, Mathieu Picard, is also the founder of AnyLeads — a company that has helped giants like Microsoft, Coca Cola, Amazon, and many others generate over 10,000,000 leads in the last five years. 

When it comes to outreach software, we know what we’re talking about, and we have the results to prove it. That said, we won’t tell you what tools you should be using. Instead, we’ll provide you with an unbiased review of Lemlist, so you can make your own, informed decision. 

We’ve also reviewed 20+ of the most popular outreach tools, so if you find that Lemlist doesn’t align with your business goals or doesn’t integrate with your workflows, you can always check out one of Lemlist alternatives.

Let’s jump right in!

About Lemlist

Lemlist is a tool that attempts to bring something new and unique into the outreach game. It focuses on personalization, through the clever use of dynamic images and videos that help you form a relationship with your prospects. 

The tool offers a 14-day free trial, giving you the opportunity to test out its features and functionality before making a commitment. 

Lemlist Homepage

Simply click the “Start Your Free Trial” button and type in your name, email address, and password. You’ll be redirected to the Lemlist app automatically, where the tool will prompt you to start a new campaign.

You might be thrown off by the tool’s features at first, especially the one labeled “Graveyard,” but Lemlist will guide you through the campaign creation process step-by-step, so it’s actually really easy to get started with the tool.

If you want to learn more about the various options this tool provides before diving right in, you can always check out Lemlist’s training center. Here, you’ll have access to 36 training videos that explain how to make the most out of the tool. 

What’s interesting about Lemlist’s free trial is that it allows you to test out all of the tool’s features. This option is critical since some of the features like A/B testing and integrations are exclusive to specific pricing plans. 

Keep in mind that the email limit for the free trial is set at 50 emails. 

If you opt to upgrade to the paid version of the tool after the 14-day trial period, you’ll have three options:

• Silver 

• Gold 

• Platinum 

Lemlist Pricing

To get access to everything Lemlist has to offer, you’ll realistically have to go for the most expensive paid plan. While the Silver option is quite affordable, it’s also extremely limiting — you can only send 100 emails each day, and you won’t have access to any of the features that make this stool worth buying in the first place. 

Before we go over Lemlist’s key features, here’s a quick overview of the tool:

Lemlist Key Features

Lemlist’s features can be broken down into the following categories:

1. Deliverability

2. Personalization

3. Automation

4. Follow-ups

5. Integrations

Across these categories, Lemlist covers everything you would expect from an email outreach software. The one thing this tool doesn’t offer is white-labeling. 

If you’re looking for white-label outreach and lead generation solutions, check our SaaS products to discover outstanding software you can both use and resell.

Deliverability

When doing cold email outreach, one of the main concerns is your emails never reaching the recipient’s inbox. A study by Return Path shows that more than 20% of cold emails sent from new accounts never make it to prospects’ inboxes. 

In other words, you can’t start sending out hundreds of cold emails from the get-go. You need to start small and gradually increase the number of emails you send each day. Another great way to “warm up” your email address is to receive and respond to emails.

Lemlist lets you accomplish this with ease, thanks to its automatic email warmups. 

You can enable “lemwarm” by navigating to Settings and selecting Email Warmup. 

The tool’s “lemwarm” feature lets you set the number of emails you want to send out, as well as input the ramp-up increment value per day. For instance, you can start at ten emails, and have the tool increase that number by five emails each day. If you’re using an existing, active email address instead of a new one, you can start at 100 emails and increase the number by 50 each day. 

Another great thing about the “lemwarm” feature is that it also connects you with other Lemlist users that have also enabled it. The tool is connected to a server from which it sends automatic emails between you and other users and responds to them, so it can warm up your email address rather quickly.

Apart from warming up your email address, Lemlist also shows you where your emails are landing. The data is shown on a color-coded graph, so you can get an idea of your campaign’s performance at a glance.

Lemwarm Report

Image source: Lemlist

From the tool’s dashboard, you can also click on any of the emojis, and a side-menu will pop-up, showing you recent activity for opened, clicked, replied, and bounced emails, as well as the ones that generated interest or caused a prospect to opt-out. 

Lemlist Activity Dashboard

Image source: Lemlist

If you want, you can also manually test the emails you’re sending out. You can have Lemlist send a test email to your email address, so you can see exactly where they end up. The tool will also provide suggestions to help you improve your sender score and elude the spam folder.

Personalization

This is where Lemlist truly shines. The tool allows you to fully customize your cold emails by adding text, dynamic images, and even clickable video thumbnails. This is a great way to make your cold emails stand out, boost engagement, and get clicks. 

Most people send out generic cold emails that are exactly the same for each prospect. The only thing that changes is the prospect’s name in the opening line. With Lemlist, you have a lot more options at your disposal. 

Lemlist allows you to leverage liquid and spin syntax to automate entire sentences or even paragraphs, add specific filters, and introduce random variations to your emails to make them more unique and help you grab the prospect’s attention.

Lemlist Syntax Personalization

Image source: Lemlist

When you go to create emails in Lemlist, you’ll have the option to either choose between one of the built-in templates or write a new email from scratch. We highly recommend checking out 35+ templates the tool provides, as they’ll show you what you can do with the tool and provide you with ideas for your campaign.

Here’s an example from the tool that shows one of the possible creative uses for dynamic images.

Lemlist Dynamic Image Template

The idea behind these dynamic images is that you can customize them for each prospect. In the screenshot above, you can see that the ideas aren’t actually written on the board. Still, that doesn’t mean you have to write them out manually for every single prospect.

You can set up the tool to pull the company name for each recipient, as well as create a list of reasons, pain points, or solutions that Lemlist can pull and add to the images in each email. This is just one example, but it’s the same principle if you want to use screenshots, company logos, emojis, or any other images you believe will grab their attention. 

Lemlist also lets you add clickable video thumbnails to your cold emails. That said, this feature isn’t as mind-blowing as we initially thought. It doesn’t let you embed the video in the email, but rather allows you to attack the link to the image. In other words, you have to create the thumbnail yourself — find an image, download the YouTube play button as a PNG and add it to the image, and add the link to an existing video. 

It’s a bit of extra work that might generate a ton of clicks. After all, we all love videos. If you have great videos on your channel and want to drive YouTube traffic with your cold emails, we definitely recommend leveraging this feature.  

Before sending out the emails, you can also select the “Manual Review” option to customize individual emails for specific prospects if you want to make the emails even more personalized. 

Automation

When scheduling your outreach campaigns, you want to have as much flexibility as possible. 

You don’t just want to pick a time of day and have the tool send out emails to all of your prospects at once. The time at which you send the emails can have a big impact on your deliverability, so it’s always good to have the option to experiment with different times.

Lemlist offers exactly that! When you navigate to the scheduling part of your campaign, you have the option of selecting a timeframe, say between 9 AM and 6 PM. Lemlist will then use its sending algorithm to test out different times and adjust its sending patterns according to the results. 

Lemlist Scheduling

You can also check which days you want to send the emails on, as well as the maximum number of “buddies-to-be” — the term Lemlist uses to refer to prospects — to receive the emails. 

By setting the maximum number of recipients, you can create multiple schedules and test out different times, or send out different campaigns at different times. You can also set the delay between the first email and follow-up emails to avoid making your emails feel like spam and make sure you don’t annoy your prospects by constantly popping-up in their inbox.

Follow-Ups

Lemlist allows you to create automated email sequences, so you can follow-up with your prospects after sending the initial outreach email. You can customize and personalize each email in the sequence, change the order of emails, and add or remove emails at any time.

The tool also lets you save your highest-converting emails as templates for future use. Another option Lemlist provides is setting conditions for removing prospects from a sequence. For example, if a prospect clicks a link or replies to an email, the tool can remove their email address from the sequence. 

This feature is useful since you don’t want to continue spamming them with follow-up emails if they’ve already converted or completed a desired action. The tool will immediately notify you when the criteria are met, so you can take over and manually reach out to your lead. 

The one thing that’s missing is the ability to transfer a lead to a different email sequence once they’ve clicked a link or replied to your email. 

This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Lemlist lets you create dynamic landing pages and include links to them in your cold emails. You can embed videos on these landing pages or prompt the prospects to schedule a meeting with your company. 

There’s also the fact that you can include links to your existing landing and product pages in the emails. Note that, unless they opt-in or make a purchase, you’ll have to manually add their email address to your autoresponder if you want to start sending them other promotional emails.

Integrations

Lemlist integrates with quite a few applications, allowing you to use it in conjunction with your favorite tools.

As far as CRMs go, you can connect your Lemlist account to Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive. 

Lemlist also integrates with the following lead generation tools:

• Uplead

• Dropcontact

• LeadFuze

• Bouncer

• Debounce

You can also connect your Lemlist account to Zapier, to get quick access to all your favorite apps. You can see the full list of Lemlist integrations here.

Lemlist Drawbacks

Now that we’ve covered the good, it’s time to talk about the bad. 

There is one major drawback of Lemlist that makes it almost unusable for the vast majority of affiliates, marketers, resellers, startups, and business owners. 

The number of outreach emails you can send each day is capped at 500. This severely limits the impact of the tool, as you can only reach a fraction of your target audience thanks to this limitation.

The limit Lemlist enforces means you’ll have to wait for an entire campaign to end — which is at least a week for a five-email sequence — before you can start sending out emails to another 500 prospects. In practical terms, this means that, in a month, you can reach a maximum of 2,000 people. 

Given this limitation, every positive thing we’ve talked about previously falls down the drain. The 500 daily emails might be enough for some bloggers who are just starting out, but even then, there are far less restrictive options that don’t require as big of an investment (remember that some of Lemlist’s features are only available with the $99/month Platinum plan).

Another potential problem with this software is that it doesn’t support email attachments. You can’t share images, presentations, infographics, or any other documents with your prospects through Lemlist. If you need to add an attachment, you will have to send the emails manually.

When it comes to the dynamic images, which are supposed to be the tool’s unique sales proposition (USP), we can’t help but feel that the feature is a bit bare-bones. There is no snap grid, so aligning the text with the image can be trickier than it seems. There are also no options to change the font or the font size, so you’re kind of stuck with the Comic Sans-looking font the company opted for. 

Lemlist Alternatives

If the 500 daily emails limit Lemlist imposes is something that forces you to look elsewhere for an email outreach tool, or you’re looking for something more than just sending out cold emails — there are plenty of alternatives to choose from. 

We reviewed 20+ of the most popular outreach solutions on pricing, personalization, automation, tracking, lead scoring, and other important features. 

White-Label Outreach Tools You Can Use and Resell

One of the main questions you have to answer before you can start sending out cold emails with Lemlist or any other email outreach tool is — where are you going to find the email addresses?

Sure, you can scour LinkedIn in search of your target audience’s emails, but it will take weeks, if not months, to put together a sizable email list. You can also buy email lists from Internet “gurus” and self-proclaimed “expert marketers,” but the quality of those is rather questionable.

Thankfully, there’s a third, much better option. We have a variety of fully white-label outreach and lead generation tools you can both use and resell! 

Our enrichment data software lets you quickly generate thousands of leads from a list of companies. The tool is incredibly easy to use — all you need to do is import a list of companies, and the tool will provide you with a list of leads related to them, including:

• Emails

• Company size

• Location

• Additional information

The best part about this and other software Sell SaaS offers is the fact that you can fully rebrand it and sell it to your clients. Just add your logo, company name, and colors, and you can start selling the tool as your own. You’ll get to keep from 60% to 80% of the money you make from the sales, depending on how successful you are at reselling the software.

Other awesome Sell SaaS white-label tools you can use and resell include:

• Email, phone, and social media extractor — extract emails, social media URLs and usernames, and phone numbers from a list of domains

• Newsletter campaign creator with unlimited emails to send — create fully customizable email campaigns and send an unlimited amount of emails

• B2B social media email extractor — extract B2B emails and contacts from social media